Shorelines by Alycia Pirmohamed
Poet Alycia Pirmohamed turns to prose in her debut nonfiction book, an exquisite memoir that resists the demands of the genre
Alycia Pirmohamed’s Shorelines could be defined as memoir, and yet resists many harmful and colonial expectations of memoir that require the exploitation of families and traumas for content. From Pirmohamed’s withholding of details blooms a greater form of memoir – one that follows sensory experience, that is rooted more in greenness, in scents of pine, in the generosity of fog.
The non-specificity of the narrative allows for universal connections to her experiences, but we also are afforded the privilege of witnessing recollections of Pirmohamed’s migratory life and ancestry: from her parents’ Indian ancestry and childhoods in Tanzania, to her childhood in Alberta and adult years in Oregon and Scotland. We join Pirmohamed on hikes through various landscapes, building a network of nature and memory that follows her from land to sea. Through that structure of the shoreline, we meet Pirmohamed in liminal spaces so fertile with hybridity and multiplicity.
The wonder of Shorelines is in Pirmohamed’s candid voice; she worries about her writing and desires a completeness of identity: ‘I wanted the summit to provide the clarity I always longed for.’ And yet through the journeys of memory, as borders and timelines disintegrate, Pirmohamed finds only fragments, learning to be comfortable with the trickster mirage that is the process of belonging and becoming: ‘I think it’s possible I’m always in a liquid state of matter, never quite arriving…’
